Page 2 of The Thing About My Prince
“Um. I’m fine, thanks.” The shimmy of excitement in my chest has been replaced by an icy heaviness. “Is there a problem?”
“Nope. No problem at all.” He rolls a gold pen between his fingers. He told me ages ago that it was a gift from his daughter. Before that, I’d never thought of him with a family. It’s impossible to imagine Julian playing with a child.
“There’s one little thing we need you to do before we ship you off,” he adds.
A catch. Of course there’s a fucking catch. Of course I can’t be given the job purely because I’d be good at it.
I even proved myself in the field covering maternity leave in Syria, where I earned plaudits for getting an interview with a family who’d been held captive in a two-week siege, and for finding a hidden camera that had been planted in our office by God knows who. There was this weird old plastic tree in the corner of the room that seemed out of place and gave me the creeps, so one day I took a closer look and found a little hole in the trunk that had a tiny camera behind it.
Julian knows without a shred of doubt that I’ll make this new job my life.
The injustice of it gnaws at my guts before I even know what the catch is.
“What’s the little thing?” My fingers twist together.
His chair creaks as he leans back and looks up at me. “Remember how well-received your ghostwritten autobiography of Sabrina Summers was?”
Oh God, no. No, no, no. Not another vacuous pop star book.
My heart races with a mixture of fury, panic, and dread.
“Yes.” I do my best to keep my voice measured and even, but my one-word response comes out with all the eagerness of someone being dragged in for a root canal with no anesthetic.
“Well, the folks upstairs”—he indicates the ceiling again, this time by pointing the pen at it—“are in a bit of a pickle with a very high-profile memoir. Turns out this person is a wretched writer. So they urgently need a ghost for it.”
My racing heart plummets to my stomach so fast and hard that it drops me back into the chair. Is this the price I have to pay? Writing another life story for another singer who’s too young to have barely even had a life to write about yet?
It took every ounce of creativity I had last time to wring out something even close to readable. The thought of having to do it again makes me want to snatch Julian’s pen out of his hand and stab it in my eyeballs.
“Please, no” is the only pathetic whimper of a response I can manage.
“When I say high profile, I meanhigh profile,” he says, like that will sell it to me.
“Like who? The teenage star of whatever superhero franchise is currently raking in billions? The kid who won this season ofAmerica’s Pop Idol? Maybe the scruffy little dog from that new romcom movie?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic, Alexandra.”
And there’s no need for him to be so fucking patronizing.
I straighten my back and fold my arms. “What if I say no?”
“Well, I just told you the Nexus Desk is being disbanded so…” He completes the sentence with a shrug.
“Seriously? You’re saying it’s write a bubblegum memoir to get the job I’ve always wanted, or have no job at all?”
“Pretty much.” He nods slowly. “But I don’t doubt you’d have no trouble getting your dream job elsewhere.” His voice drips with sarcasm. “I mean, why wouldn’tThe New York Timesor the BBC or the like be willing to leapfrog you over all their other candidates who’ve either worked for them for forever or possess a glowing, decade-long, track record of conflict reporting, and deploy you, as a newcomer, immediately to a war zone?”
He’s right.The Currentis where I’ve put in all the groundwork, built my path toward the career I want. If I moved somewhere, without a résumé of war reporting, they’d expect me to prove myself to them all over again. That’s the way it works.
Logic says it’s quicker to suck up a few months trailing around after an insufferable celebrity, following them to parties, watching them take pouty Insta photos, and spend endless hours interviewing them to elicit tedious snippets about their life that I can puff up into something worthy of a book that will sell purely because of the face on the glossy cover.
“Why does it have to be me who writes this book? Why not someone else on the team? Or someone who, you know, actually ghostwrites memoirs for a living?”
“Sabrina’s book was such a success that the editors think you have the winning formula. They specifically requested you.” He pinches the bridge of his nose.
I sigh the heavy resigned sigh of someone who has no option other than to reluctantly accept their fate and live the cliché of short-term pain for long-term gain.
“Go on.” It’s hard not to groan. “Whose book needs to be written?”
